CHANEY MONUMENT: One of Ozark County’s oldest businesses, continues as a family affair – and a community gift

The months leading up to Memorial Day have traditionally been the busiest time of year for Chaney Monument, one of Ozark County’s oldest businesses. But lately that’s changed a bit. 

“It usually started in January-February,” said owner Rob Collins. “People started coming in at that time so they had a headstone produced by Memorial Day. Back then it was such a big deal. They had dinner on the grounds at a lot of the cemeteries, and folks wanted their relative’s headstone ready for that. It’s still an important date. But now we get more people saying they want the stone set by the person’s birthday, or some other certain date.” 

The company produces 150-200 headstones in a typical year, serving communities within a roughly 100-mile radius. “We go plumb to Ponca and Marshall and Mountain View, Arkansas, to Rogersville and all over,” Collins said. “Of course, most are here local, and a lot of them are people I’ve known all my life. Some of them I’ve grown up with or even my own family.”

Friends sometimes ask Collins how he’s able to make monuments for the people he’s closest to. 

“I would much rather do it myself,” said Collins, who has created headstones for his mother, Dixie Collins, who died in 2013, and his grandson, Marshall “Ironman” Collins, who was born 12 weeks early and died in 2014 when he was only 9 months old. 

“It’s difficult, but then, in another sense, it’s honoring them. I wouldn’t want another monument company to do it. I think of this as the last thing I can do for them, and maybe the most important, because it’ll be there a long, long time,” he said.

A hands-on company started by a man with no hands

Chaney Monument is an 86-year-old company that started in 1935 at the Gainesville-area home of the late Leonard and Hattie Chaney on old Highway 160 west of its former intersection with old Highway 5. Amazingly, this business that originally relied almost completely on physical, hands-on work was launched by a man who had no hands. 

Ozark County native Leonard Chaney was working as a master mechanic for a construction company in Oklahoma in November 1927, when both of his hands were “blown to tatters” as the 85-90 percussion caps he was carrying exploded. Both hands had to be amputated to “just below the elbow,” according to a report in the Dec. 2, 1927, edition of the Ozark County Times.

Leonard was fitted with mechanical, pincer “hooks” that would seem primitive by today’s standards of advanced bionic prostheses. But the devastating setback wasn’t devastating for Chaney. He and his brother started Chaney monument in “what they called the old chicken house,” Rob Collins said. “I was told it was a shed with a 6-foot ceiling, maybe a 30-by-40-foot production room where you roll the headstones over on a rolling table to the hoist so it could be picked up and moved.”

In the early days, he said, “all the curves, and if the tops of the monument were curved, you had to have protractors” and letters and flowers were cut into a headstone using a rubber stencil “that comes in a can,” Collins said. “You heat it on the stove and pour it onto the front of the monument to let it cool. Then the letters and flowers were hand cut.  The flowers were all drawn onto tracing paper. A lot that was done out of design books. You traced the design. Then you take a spoon and rub it on your hair to get the oils from your hair so it would slide over the tracing paper to transfer the pencil marks to the rubber stencil. Then you cut the stencil.”

For the lettering, “You would draw a rectangle and draw out lines. You had aluminum letters that were backward. You placed them upside down on this sliding board that had a roller of carbon paper you slid over the top, then the tracing paper over that. You would use the carbon paper to put the name onto the tracing paper and transfer that onto the lines you can draw. Then you’d use the stencil knives to cut everything out.”

A lot of that work today is done using computer imaging and lasers, Collins said, “but we still use that same kind of stencil knife. You cut around things but don’t have to cut the letters by hand. Now it’s cut out by computer. A stencil plotter cuts the letters.”

The plotter, he said, is a complicated device that cost $12,000.

Angie Collins, Rob’s former wife, does all the computer and design work at Chaney Monument. Their son, Seth, is also employed at the company, along with Milan Chisam, the Gainesville High School art teacher who completes amazingly detailed pictures on headstones, including the person’s home or barn or about anything else. 

“The actual portrait is laser etched,” Collins said. “We have it done at a company then Milan does all the rest by hand – draws it on and etches it, and then we do the white lithochrome dye to make it stand out.”

Sandblasting is still part of the process, but that equipment is no longer powered by the old Model A Ford that Leonard Chaney converted into an air compressor, Collins said. “I never saw that thing run, but I played on it when I was a kid. Leonard had some kind of conversion kit he used.”

Seeing the way things are done now, “Leonard would be amazed, he said. “I don’t know how he survived it, doing the work we do now. It’s the same process, but now it’s a lot easier than the way Leonard did it. 

A career that started as 

a ‘little-bitty kid’

His connection to the business started when he was “a little-bitty kid,” said Collins, who remembers working at Chaney Monument as a boy with his uncle, W. D. “Dub” Collins.

Leonard and Hattie Chaney’s son, Stanley, took over the business around 1963, with Leonard still helping at the monument company but also working in the tax and bookkeeping business he and his wife operated. Chaney was also elected Ozark County Administrator in 1967. He died in 1969 of an apparent heart attack. 

Dub Collins was Stanley Chaney’s best friend, and Dub worked with Stanley in the business when needed. Dub was Rob Collins’ uncle, his mother’s brother. After Dub came home from serving with the Army in Vietnam, he went back to work at the monument company, and in 1971, Stanley wanted to sell the business and drive a truck. So Dub bought Chaney Monument from Stanley, and Stanley started an over-the-road truck-driving career with his wife, Barbara. 

 “Dub moved into the [Chaneys’] old rock house,” Collins said. “The office was in one of the old bedrooms, and the showroom was in the yard. When I was a kid, Dub and his wife, Dorlene, would babysit me a lot, and I would spend summers in the monument shop. I still have a scar on my arm from where I fell while I was playing on a monument Dub had told me not to be on. It had dew on it, and I slipped.”

His first job at the company, when he was about 5, was helping at a cemetery. “Back then we had a hoist on the side of the truck that was hand-pumped. My job was to pump the stone up, about a fourth-inch at a time,” he said. 

In the early days of Chaney Monument, setting the stone was a huge operation. “I’ve been told they sometimes hauled the stone to the cemetery in a wagon, and it might take them two days to get it there,” Collins said. “When Dub and Stanley were working together, they would load big rocks they got out of a field. They would dig a hole for the headstone, put the rock in there and then beat them with a sledgehammer to make gravel.” 

A block and tackle would be set up over the hole, he said. To get the stone off the truck, he said, “we had a slide board with carpet on it. They would literally hoist the stone to the slide board and slide it off the wagon to a four-wheel dolly and take it to the block and tackle to set it in place.”

Sometimes the company brought gravel to the grave site. “I remember loading gravel into tow sacks and loading it on the truck. I was probably 7 or 8 years old, throwing 100-pound bags of gravel,” Collins said.

Today, Collins and his crew can set a standard-size monument in 45 minutes if there aren’t any complications, he said. 

Changes through the years

From 1982 until 2007, with a two-year break in the mid-1980s, Chaney Monument had a government contract to make military headstones. “At one time, there were seven contractors in the country doing them. They were making 55,000 of them a year. We made nine to 10 thousand of them,” Collins said, also recalling that he worked on many of those military headstones. “I can remember helping with military markers when I was 10-12 years old, lifting 118-pound stones up over my head.”

But then the government went to only one contractor, he said, “and we lost that contract. Now they’re all made by a company in Vermont.”

In the early days, Chaney Monument had at least one Ozark County competitor, Boone and Company, owned by either Paul Boone or his father – Collins isn’t sure which; he thinks Leonard Chaney might have bought out that company. 

“And you won’t believe this, but a lot of headstones came from Montgomery Ward. You could order it and place it yourself – or maybe you could hire Leonard to do it for you,” Collins said, adding that he can recognize those stones “to a certain extent. They’re not really granite.

“I’ve seen some monuments that the letters have been pressed in to. Some stones, I have no idea where they came from, but they are porcelain or steel covered with porcelain. The letters are raised, so they had to have been poured. You peck on them, and they’re hollow,” he said. 

Most of the granite for the stones Collins makes comes from Elberton, Georgia, “the granite capital of the world,” he said. “It’s a lighter gray color.” 

Other stones, including black granite and other colors, “come from all over the world,” he said. “A lot of them come from India and China, with a little coming from Africa.”

Surviving setbacks

Chaney Monument has survived several major setbacks. After Dub Collins bought the company in 1971, he moved it to a new building at its current location on Highway 160/5 west of the Gainesville business district. 

Collins built a new building there and continued the business, with Rob working alongside him. “I say I grew up in this business and it’s pretty much all I’ve ever done, and it’s really true. I graduated high school in 1988 on a Sunday, and Monday morning I was here at work. I didn’t go on the senior trip. I was expected to be at work.” 

Then, in 1989, the company’s building burned in a fire blamed on a wood-burning stove, Rob said. It was a hard loss, but Dub Collins rebuilt and kept the business going, with Rob’s help. “The last 10 years he was here, I was involved with about everything, but ultimately it was all his decision,” Rob said.

Dub Collins’ wife, Dorlene, died in 1999, and Dub grieved her death mightily. In 2007, Dub died by suicide. In shock and grieving, himself, for his beloved uncle, Rob, then 36, had to step up. 

“We had five or six of us employees then, and I had a responsibility to them. They needed paychecks. So we had to keep going,” said Rob, who was at the business working with customers when he got the news that Dub had died. “We shut down for a week, and the next Monday we went back to work. My mom was furious at me, but I said, ‘Mom, I have responsibilities to those employees and to the community. It’s ultimately on me.’”

It wasn’t easy, but he did it – after making a few changes. 

His friend Jeff Nash told him that, after his brother, Todd, died, the hardest thing was walking back into the business they shared and “seeing that empty chair,” Rob said. “It was the same for me, seeing that chair. That was Dub’s chair. I took it out and bought a new one. Everything had been Dub’s decision. I was involved with everything. He would say, ‘R.D. (my initials for Robert Dale), what do you think?’ But ultimately it was Dub’s decision on everything. And all of a sudden, it was ultimately on me. I had to take the reins.”  

Now he advises others who are grieving to try to “stay busy. I don’t care if it’s gardening or working somewhere or whatever you do, it’s better to stay busy at something,” he said.

With Rob at the helm, Chaney Monument continued on. Then, in 2012, the business burned again. This time the fire had an electrical cause. “It started in the power box,” Rob said.

But once again, the building was rebuilt, and the business continued.

Still a family business

And, as always, Chaney Monument continues as a family affair. Rob and Angie continue working together, and their son Seth works with them. “He already knows everything. He’s been right here since baby,” Rob said. “He’s watched and learned, and the plan is that someday I’ll retire and it’ll all be his. And if I’m able, I’ll help.

Until then, they all work together with Chisam and another employee, Patrick Reynolds, Angie’s brother, producing only monuments that meet Rob’s high standards. “I’m not going to set a stone that I wouldn’t put on my family’s graves,” he said. “We take pride in our work. We have a lot of people come in and say, ‘We were referred to you because we heard you were the best.’ That’s important.”

After producing headstones for some of his own closest family members, Rob knows firsthand that designing a monument for a loved one can be a heartbreaking step in the grieving process, a final duty confirming the death of someone who was dearly loved. When the monument is for someone Rob knew well, he might try to lighten the moment, if he can, by sharing a little story with the relatives describing something funny he remembers their loved one doing. But there have been times, too, when Rob has wiped away his own tears as the person is remembered. 

He considers Chaney Monument, a business, of course, but it’s also the Collins family’s gift to their community. They’re familiar with grief, and Rob understands that his customers’ grief “is as hard as mine was.”